The recent revolution in technologies for dynamically sharing virtualizations of hardware resources, software, and information storage across networks has increased the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of computing. More specifically, the ability to provide on demand virtual computing resources and storage through the advent of virtualization has enabled consumers of processing resources and storage to flexibly structure their computing and storage costs in response to immediately perceived computing and storage needs. Virtualization allows customers to purchase processor cycles and storage at the time of demand, rather than buying or leasing fixed hardware in provisioning cycles that are dictated by the delays and costs of manufacture and deployment of hardware.
Virtualized computing environments are frequently supported by block-based storage, object-based storage, database services, and/or other virtual storage services. In some situations, storage resources may be able to interact with various computing virtualizations through a series of standardized storage calls that render the storage resources functionally agnostic to the structural and functional details of the block-based storage volumes that they support and the operating systems executing on the virtualizations to which they provide storage availability.
Some virtualized computing environments may store snapshots including software stacks or images to be used by virtualized compute servers of a compute service, such as machine images used for booting the compute servers, or point-in-time snapshots used to recover server state as of a desired point in time, at a storage repository service implemented by the same provider network. In some scenarios, the responsiveness of various types of operations as perceived by clients of the compute service may be impacted negatively due to latencies involved in inter-service data transfers.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that the embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.